The Ten Commandments have been lodged as moral prohibitions in our collective psyche. Yet they are so much more. When we break them down into their essence, we find a blueprint for living without limits!
The first commandments, in a sense, say it all. There is only one power. In other words, the idea of a dualistic world is in violation of this commandment. We…and everything in our world…are like holographic projections of Divine Mind. I know we don’t always behave in very Divine fashion at all, but that is our essence and that’s what the commandments are calling upon us to remember and live by.
We violate the commandments’ essence when we play small and pretend –even though unconsciously—that we are unworthy and incapable. We are out of alignment when we covet that which others have, thinking it is the ticket to our well-being but somehow off limits for us. We fail to bear witness to the truth when we interpret circumstances as hopeless or people as lacking in innate power and possibility.
One of the interesting twists to this approach is to challenge the new age form of covetousness and theft. Have you ever caught yourself wanting to keep up with the Jones’s demonstrations? When you heard the folks, for example, who testified on The Secret to how they ended up with jobs or beautiful houses because they had used the Law of Attraction, did you indulge in envy or “I wish I could do that” thinking? The real problem here is that when we do this we are still stuck in materialism and outside-in thinking. Our good is not outside us. Prayer is not a strategy for persuading an outside entity to give us the goods. Prayer is a strategy for reminding ourselves who we are. We are manifestations of the Divine and so all that we desire flows from us. If we try to get prosperity through prayer without having a prosperity consciousness, we are attempting to steal it. We have to earn it by changing our consciousness to truth.
The heart of the final commandment is to covet, or, desire passionately (comes from the same root as Cupid) an awareness of oneness with God. There is a story from an Eastern tradition of a teacher who holds his student by the feet with the student’s head immersed in water. When he pulls the student out again, the teacher asks him what he wanted more than anything while in the water. “Air!” was the response. The teacher replied, “When you desire the experience of God as much as you just now wanted air, then you will experience the awakening.”
I love the way Kahlil Gibran described prayer. “Prayer is the expansion of ourselves into the living ethers.” The Commandments are showing us how to be a living prayer. We are not here to get that which is outside us. We are here to give that which we are.
